(p.375) A “man always on the move,” he toyed “with the thought that he might have been, had fate so decided, a statesman (a political advisor) as well as a writer … or a pure philosopher” or, as the original – but not the translation – continues, “an unqualified worker, that is, nothing or nobody in particular” (“ou un travailleur sans qualification, donc un je ne sais quoi ou un je ne sais qui”)..

(p.71) For Blanchot, the problem with the Marxist hermeneutic is that it takes social values merely to be ideological expressions of material realities of production and scarcity. It thus reduces individuals to impersonal forces of labor and need, social relations to instrumentalizing transactions, and the ethical to the economic. In Mascolo’s approach to the communist project, however, Blanchot identifies a solution to the paradox of viewing human relationships as a realm purely of means, while striving toward the goal of freedom and equality.

(p.72) On the one hand, we must strive to realize the communist ideal of a world that no longer treats people as things, albeit through pragmatic political action that “engages us, profoundly, dangerously, in the world of things, of ‘useful relations,’ of ‘efficient’ works, in which we always risk losing ourselves”. On the other hand, we must nurture the noninstrumental relationships of our personal lives and protect them from the strategic calculations of the political sphere. This model of social relations, though it can as yet only be realized at the level of private life, constitutes an indispensable expression of “communist...

(p.97) Why does the writer find it so hard to make his or her literary work pass into the realm of metaphysical work? As Maurice Blanchot notes, “If we see work as the force of history, the force that transforms man while it transforms the world, then a writer’s activity must be recognized as the highest form of work” (Gaze 33). Blanchot here follows a scrupulous philosophical analysis of work. He uses the example of a stove: if a person wants to get warm, she builds a stove; she negates merely disparate elements by casting them together in a higher unity....

(p.98) Blanchot here gives a concise summary of the work of dialectic, which negates in order to bring elements into a higher transformation or synthesis within the teleological economy of history. The idea of heat is realized in the work that builds the stove; the end product of heat is brought about and mastered in the negation of the disconnected elements—steel, rivets, pipe, rock, cement—that form the final unity of the usable stove. In turn, the stove’s heat provides the conditions for further transformations—allows other ideas to be mastered, allows other ends to be attained, allows history to progress. For Blanchot,...